A common characteristic of children is to react to pleasant experiences in their lives. From the common experience of making birthday cake mudpies as children, it can be determined that children might enjoy playing with an artificial birthday cake day after day. Such a toy might be built with many educational features in mind.
There are many instructional take-apart toys which provide educational values in a variety of ways. Young children can practice manual dexterity merely by taking the toys apart and putting them back together again. Older children may enjoy assembling and decorating the food item and then pretending to serve and eat it. This is good practice for improving table manners and to teach serving functions.
For school age children, toys teaching spelling and arithmetic are available in wide variety. Spelling one's own name and the names of friends and family can be made to come naturally in the course of play. Toys can teach counting, addition, subtraction, and fractional concepts. Instructional toys appropriate for classroom demonstrations for early grade school children are also available.
At all ages toys can reinforce the feelings of worth where this relates to events of importance. Children can also learn to share their toys with friends, imaginary or real, and learn to take turns creating importance for themselves or their friends.
An imitation cake and dish set educational toy includes a cake plate having a circular plate lip extending around the upper and outer edge defining a shallow circular cylinder having a bottom surface. A cylindrical multipiece imitation cake is sized snugly to fit into the recess formed by the lip, and formed of a plurality of pie-shaped fractional slices of a plurality of different included angles. Structure is provided with angular indicia lines inscribed on the surface of the bottom of the cylinder which correspond to the included angles. The cake surface is provided with spaced recesses to anchor decorations and lettering structure.